How do Tour de France cyclists pee on the bike? Your comprehensive guide to in-race relief

According to the Bladder & Bowel Community, the average person goes for a wee six to seven times every 24 hours, though that number can happily reach 10. That’s once every 144 minutes or two hours and 24 minutes. At the time of penning this piece, the longest stage of this year’s Tour de France, both in distance and time taken, was the 231km third stage when Birnam Girmay triumphed in just over five hours and 26 minutes.

If Girmay’s a prolific urinator, that’d mean two peeing stops en route to victory in Turin. Which is a long-winded way of asking the question of questions: how on earth do riders wee during the Tour de France?

(Not) as nature intended

Well, our urinary adventure would have started with Lotto Dstny women’s rider Mieke Docx, who liked a post of a male Lotto Dstny colleague rather impressively urinating into a bidon at this year’s Tour. But when we returned to the Twitter scene of the crime the next day, it’d gone. We suspect the powers that be deemed liking a piss not in tune with the clean image they’re looking to project.

Victor Campenaerts relieves himself into water bottle (screenshot via ITV before it was swiftly deleted off of social media)

Instead, let’s begin with the urinary rules; in other words, no indecent exposure; in other words, no weeing in (sight of) public. That’s what resulted in Tour organisers ASO penalising (Amaury Sport Organisation) the soon-to-be-retired Luke Rowe (Ineos Grenadiers) and Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) at the 2021 edition for “inappropriate behaviour – urinating in public”. Each were fined 200 Swiss francs for openly letting it flow. That’s not as bad as Belgian rider Johan Vansummeren, who faced the wrath of ASO three times at the 2010 Tour. Thrice almighty.

Penalty peeing isn’t confined to the world’s biggest cycle race. British rider Alexander Richardson, then racing for Alpecin-Fenix, faced the wrath of Kernow after a picture emerged of him urinating in public during the opening stage of the 2021 Tour of Britain from Penzance, through St Ives and onto Bodmin.

A communique released by the race organisers read, “A complaint was received from the Mayor of St Ives, who produced a picture of the rider Alexandar Richardson urinating in public, which subsequently found its way onto several social media channels.”

Richardson was fined £700. But forgiveness comes in many forms, in this case Richardson now races for Cornwall’s finest, Saint Piran.

Whether former Madison Genesis Taylor Gunman will ever forgive retired kitchen designed Steve Hines remains to be seen. Hines went to watch the 2017 Tour of Britain and got more than he bargained for when, after firing off a series of rapid shots, snapped Gunman’s unfurl-and-spray technique. “Well, when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go,” Gunman joked to The Sun.

Technique and etiquette: how do they actually do it?

So, we can see what you can’t do when your bladder’s at bursting point. But what can you do?

“It’s different for every rider,” 35-time Tour stage winner Mark Cavendish told GQ 10 years ago. “Some riders maybe take two, three, four pisses during the race. I go right at the beginning of the stage."

A picture of Sir Mark Cavendish not urinating (to the best of knowledge) - Zac Williams/SWpix.com

That early evacuation’s common, especially on sprint stages where there are kilometres and kilometres of smooth tarmac to reel back the breakaway. I recall team-car time with Trek-Segafredo years ago where, only 10km in at a Tour stage, we drove through a cast of riders on either side of the road who were emptying their bladders. It seemed early but, as the DS told me, “They’ve been hanging around at the start, then riding the neutral zone. They’ve also inevitably drunk more when not hanging around.” It’s also a good time to avoid onlookers as the TV cameras’ focus is elsewhere.

As for technique, in this uniform urinal, it’s simply a case of dismount, stretch bibs down and offload. If it’s later in the stage, there’s a GrandTour tradition that if the GC leader goes, no-one should attack (albeit if they do, inevitably Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard would reel them in).

It’s all quite orderly on the flat or early on. But, as the mountains hone into view or key sections await, the pace cranks up, making dismounting not an option. What happens then? “People have different ways,” Cavendish continued. “Some guys lift up their shorts and go. Normally, if you’re on a slight downhill, you can kind of just move to the side of the group and continue while you do it on the bike. Or you can get a teammate to push you.”

Cav’s underplaying the technique at play, which is keeping one hand on the bars with one leg nestled against the top tube. If you want to try this on your next group ride – a surefire way to lose popularity – ensure you keep your eyes looking ahead.

Where you unleash your penis depends on your bib’s elasticity, so either roll up a short leg or through the top of the bib short. And, of course, make sure wind direction is on your side (and not on your face).

Of course, if you have no other option, just let nature happen and urinate in your bibs. It can sometimes have its advantages. “In races that are soaking wet and freezing cold, I like to piss myself,” said Cavendish. “It warms me up for a split second. You get warm and you don’t have to fuss around.”

What about women’s bladders?

Mid-race toilet stops are team efforts in the women's peloton (A.S.O./Thomas Maheux)

So, for the men urinating on the fly isn’t ideal. For the women, it’s not really an option. Their stages might be shorter, and arguably more exciting, than the men’s, but they’re still out there for many hours. Take Elisa Longo Borghini, who, as of Friday 12th July, currently leads the Giro d’Italia Women. Her longest day came on stage four where she rode for just under three hours and 37 minutes. If Borghini’s a 10-a-day urinator, she’ll need to go during the stage.

Or, as AG Insurance-Soudal-Quick-Step rider Ashleigh Moolman Pasio told GCN, “It usually starts off with someone going, ‘I need a pee, do you need a pee?’ You then try and gather people across different teams to all stop at once to sort of neutralise the race.”

As for technique, “In a race, I’m the sort of rider who tries to pull the bib shorts wide enough so you don’t have to undress. But there are plenty of girls who are uncomfortable with that because they’re worried about what happens if it goes wrong, that they’re going to wet themselves, so some completely strip down. Others pull the bibs and try and pee that way.”

Monitoring urine colour

(Petar Milošević on Wikimedia Commons, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Whether they hold it in or let it out, urination’s not solely a logistical issue. Urine – more precisely, urine colour – is broadly monitored before and after every stage to check hydration levels. Most teams use a simple urine chart, but some might also use the urine-specific gravity test, especially when they have a little more time like rest days.

This involves dunking a dipstick made with a colour-sensitive pad into a rider’s urine sample. The colour the dipstick changes tells the doctor the specific gravity of their urine compared to the density of water. The normal range for urine-specific gravity is 1.005 to 1.030. Normal value ranges may vary slightly among different laboratories. A higher number than that is associated with high sodium levels, which often means dehydration.

They’re more accurate than the colour chart, says former performance nutritionist at MTN-Qhubeka, Dr Rob Child, who once regaled us with a stage at the 2014 where temperatures tipped over 40°C in the shade.

“That was a crazy hot race,” he said. “I always get feedback on the riders’ hydration levels, but it wasn’t as simple as saying your urine is this colour, so you’re dehydrated. Take B vitamins, for example. They’re heavily pigmented so a strong colour and give the riders’ wee an orange hue. It’s also difficult to tell between dehydration and beetroot juice because both can elicit a darkish red tinge.”

The wrong urine

Michel Pollentier: literally taking the piss

All in all, there’s a lot more to rider urine and urination than meets the eye. There are some complex solutions to the most natural of processes. But these processes aren’t always that natural. In fact, the Tour de France and urinary antics have often crossed swords. Take the case of Michel Pollentier. In 1978, the Belgian arrived at the Tour in the form of his life after winning the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré and his national championships.

Come stage 16, he attacked on Alpe d’Huez, taking the day’s victory and with it the yellow jersey. Or he would have. His stage-winning exploits meant he had to visit doping control, but he was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, a fellow cyclist was caught at doping control with someone else’s urine swilling around a condom tucked into his armpit with a tube weaved down his bib shorts and out the chamois. His fraud was discovered by the race doctor, who then checked all the riders in doping control. When Pollentier was finally found, he too had a condom nestled in his armpit.

Pollentier was disqualified and later explained that he’d tried to evade the controls after taking amphetamines for a breathing issue. The irony was that his own urine tested negative.

So, there you have it, the inside story on professional pissing in the peloton. If that doesn’t impress your mates over a pint of golden amber down the pub, we don’t know what will...